Start a War (Saint View Psychos #1)(55)

Always.

“Would you ever go visit Ophelia on her travels? I’d love to go traveling. I’ve never been outside the States, but I really want to go to France.”

“I could take you. It’s nice there.”

Her eyebrows raised. “You’ve been?”

“A long time ago. For the family business. But I liked it when I was there. I’d like to go again.” I’d like to go anywhere with her.

“I want to see the Eiffel Tower and the…”

Bliss continued on, listing out all the tourist hot spots. But a noise at the front of the house had caught my ear. I closed my eyes for a second, hyper-focusing in on it.

No.

No. No. No.

I pushed back from the table and shot to my feet, cutting Bliss off mid-sentence. “Will you excuse me for a moment, please? I need to take care of something.”

Without waiting for her to answer, I spun on my heel and strode through the open doors, past the kitchen to the front of the house. I yanked open the door before the person on the other side even had a chance to knock. Not that they would have. Because they never did.

“Here he is, my boy.” My father stood on the stoop; my mother’s hand tucked into the crook of his arm. His dark-gray suit was stylish and expensive. My mother’s long dress floated around her ankles.

“What are you doing here?” I demanded.

“We’re here for dinner.”

I blinked at the two of them. “You’re…I have company.”

“We know.” My mother patted my arm. “We’d like to meet her. So here we are.”

I stared blankly at them, my brain whirring. I had picked Bliss up. Her car wasn’t sitting in my driveway. I most certainly hadn’t told either of them that I had a date.

Which meant one of three things. They had my phone tapped. They were having me followed. Or they had cameras installed in my house.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if it were all three.

I glanced back through the open-plan house and caught Bliss watching. I raised a hand in an awkward wave and then moved outside onto the step with my parents, closing the door firmly behind me. “I did the job you wanted me to do. I told you, that was the end.”

My mother held her hands up. “We just came to meet your girlfriend. She’s a pretty one, isn’t she? All that beautiful long hair. Long enough to strangle someone with, isn’t it?”

My fingers clenched into fists. “You’re not meeting her. Not now. Not ever. I told you, I’m finished.”

My father clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Now, now, Son. You are living in our house.”

“I’ll move out tomorrow.”

My mother laughed, the sound nothing like when Bliss laughed. When Mother laughed it was like nails down a chalkboard. “And go where? You’re a creature of habit, Vincent. New places make you uncomfortable. Which is why you’re still hanging around here, despite the police manhunt focused on you.”

“There’s no hunt. I’ve scoured the newspapers and police scanners. The prison covered it up.”

“Maybe so, but it would only take one little phone call from a concerned citizen…”

I ground my teeth. I couldn’t go back to prison. I had friends who needed watching over. I’d met Mae, Heath, Liam, and Rowe while I was in jail. Their boy, Ripley, had become my friend after I’d escaped. They needed me, and I needed them, especially now that Mae was pregnant with a baby. I was laying low at the moment, watching from afar because I suspected the police were watching them in the hopes I’d turn up. And now there was Bliss…she needed watching as well. Even more than they did. They had each other. Bliss was all alone.

“You know I could just kill you at any time, Mother.”

My father rolled his eyes.

Mother stepped up and cupped my cheek. “But you wouldn’t. Because your Achilles’ heel has always been people you love. Foolish as that is, since it makes you easy to manipulate.”

She was right. It didn’t matter that she was the master manipulator, the one who twisted everything into a threat. Even during the months and years when Scythe had controlled my body, he’d never laid a finger on my mother. Because we both loved her. It was ingrained. Built into our hardwiring. She was the one who’d put dinner in front of me every night. Who’d tucked me into bed and brushed my hair back off my face lovingly when other kids had been mean because I wasn’t like them. She was the one who’d helped me escape the psych ward at the prison.

I didn’t want to love her. It would have been a whole lot easier not to.

Because then I could have just snapped her goddamn neck and been done with it.

Her thumb smoothed over my skin. “Look. If you aren’t ready to introduce us, then we’ll leave.”

She’d given up too easily.

My mother never gave up. Which meant that she hadn’t really come here with the intention of meeting Bliss. She’d merely come to remind me that she owned me. Because I did have soft spots.

And Bliss had rapidly become one.





21





BLISS





Vincent sat down, his cheeks pink. “I’m very sorry about that. It was my parents. We need to talk about boundaries. Clearly.”